hieroglyphics
4
8.8
- noun
- /ˌhaɪəroʊˈɡlɪfɪks/
:
jeroglíficos
- The railing is so covered with hieroglyphics it looks vaguely archaeological.
- look like hieroglyphics
- written in hieroglyphics
Examples
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Ever get a file that looks like it was written in hieroglyphics?
Academic text (2009) -
- It looks like hieroglyphics.
-
If you use a Mac or lack the latest version of Word, files saved in Word 2007 display errors or open as hieroglyphics.
Academic text (2009) -
See these hieroglyphics?
-
The mystery of hieroglyphics.
Fiction book (1990) -
They describe some of the things that those people were considering and worrying about, but that's just hieroglyphics quite a lot of the time.
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As they approach him, he gets out of his own car, ignoring them, and kneels down to study the hieroglyphics of the skid marks on the road surface.
Fiction book (1996) -
The ancient temple was adorned with hieroglyphics that tell stories of the past.
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When I received the technical manual, it seemed to be written in hieroglyphics, making it hard to understand.
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To many students, the complex math problems looked like hieroglyphics, full of symbols they could not decipher.
Antonyms
How Legible
Surface Forms
Morphology
hieroglyphics = hieroglyphic (semi-transparent) = hieroglyph + ic + s
The morphological steps from 'hieroglyph' to 'hieroglyphic' and then to the plural/collective form are regular.
Etymology
Hieroglyphics later came to mean any writing that looks mysterious or hard to read because the old sacred carvings were mysterious to most people, so now the word can describe handwriting or signs that are difficult to understand.